The present day telephone system provides means for its subscribers to verbally communicate with one another. The verbal communications must occur in real time and require that the sender and recipient have simultaneous access to their telephone stations for communication. If the sender is unable to initially place the call at a time when the recipient has access to his telephone, the sender must continue to repeat the call until the recipient is present. Similarly, if the sender desires to send the same verbal message to a number of recipients, he must repeat this process of establishing telephone contact with each recipient and repeating the message. Thus, the present day method of delivering verbal communications is time consuming, and in the business community the time spent in such present day verbal communications is inefficient and reduces personal productivity.
While auxiliary devices, such as telephone recording systems, may be installed for individual telephone sets, such devices do not fill the need for the rapid and efficient delivery of verbal messages in the business community. A need has thus arisen for a centralized telecommunications system which eliminates many of the inconveniences, inefficiency and time consuming requirements of the existing telephone network.
One solution to this problem has been the very recently developed voice message systems that receive audio messages from telephone stations for storage and later retrieval by another party. Normally, full access to these message systems is limited to a subscribing party who is termed a "user". In some situations, however, it is desirable to provide access to some "non-users", that is, parties that do not subscribe to the message system itself and also to certain select users. Since a non-user does not bear any portion of the burden for maintaining or operating the system, the non-user's access must be controlled by the user. The present systems allow some limited access by a non-user in that users may deliver messages to non-users by having the system call the non-user and force deliver messages to them. In addition, a particular user may have available for his use certain features that are not generally available to other users. In view of this very limited access by a non-user and the restricted use by some users, it is desirable to expand the access that these parties would have to the system and allow the user to control this access.